Re: st:tips to manage multiple do files?

I was wondering if anyone could share any tips of managing many do
files for one research project. Thanks for your help!
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(1) How to make it easy to find some specific work in several do files?

Now I have to open most of them to see if the file has the part I'm
looking for. The thing is, it is kind of hard to remember clearly the
content of each file after even two or three days not working with
them. I tried to write outline in the beginning of each file, but I
have to open each of them to get the outline.

I find searching for specific work in text files pretty easy using
commands such as 'grep' which searches specified text files for regular
expressions. It has a heritage from *NIX systems (UNIX/BSD/Linux), but
even if your using Windows you can install Cygwin
(http://www.cygwin.com) and have the power of this command (and many
other very useful and powerful commands). You can then use a specific
comment style for your outline and simply search on that regular
expression to get the outline without having to open the file up. There
are various useful flags to this command such as '-R' to search
recursively '-A #' / '-B #' which will output # lines After /Before the
matched regular expression and many many more that are detailed in the
help that comes with it.

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(2) detailed comments in do files
For me it's useful to have detailed comments to explain what I'm
doing in most parts in a do file. Those details include what the
commands are doing, anything I should be careful with in future,
sources I get the ideas, why the alternative ways are not good, summary
of the results..... But a do file has limitation of number of lines in
it. So, Writing a lot of comments means I have to create many do files.
So, is there any good habit to deal with this? Is it better that in do
files just add concise comments and take notes in other files?

I too tend to write fairly detailed comments in my do-files. There's
not much to get around this, but over the years as my knowledge and
understanding of Stata commands and syntax has developed I find that I
write less verbose comments about what a particular command(s) is
doing. I don't think that just because you're writing lots of comments
you have to write lots of do-files.

Personally I tend to divide my scripts into three classes for any given
piece of work, and will give them names such as...

master.do A main script that simply callse the following subsequent
scripts in turn.
prep.do Script to read in, clean, tidy, and label the data,
deriving any variables that are required
analysis.do The main bulk of the analysis, which will save results to
Stata formatted data sets (sometimes multiple analysis files depending
on how complex the analysis is)
results.do Uses the results data sets to generate tables and graphs
for input into documents/reports

Neil

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